As Fiscal Talks Heat Up, Questions on Whether Boehner Can Get the Votes

Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday after urging, on the House floor, President Obama to offer more specifics on spending cuts.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — With negotiations quickening on Tuesday to prevent a year-end fiscal crisis, White House officials once again are confronting a vexing question: Can Speaker John A. Boehner deliver enough Republican votes for whatever deficit-reduction plan he and President Obama might decide?

Eighteen months ago the White House was forced to answer in the negative after secret negotiations between the two leaders collapsed once word leaked of their tentative deal, with its proposed revenue increases. But once again, Mr. Obama must put his fate in Mr. Boehner’s hands on the issue that will help define the president’s second term, and his legacy.

On Monday, the president presented a new offer and on Tuesday, Mr. Boehner answered back as he and the president conferred by telephone. That talk came two days after a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office without staff members present — their first solo meeting since those failed talks toward a “grand bargain” in July 2011. While neither provided details, one person familiar with the White House proposal said Mr. Obama had reduced his call for $1.6 trillion in additional revenues from the wealthy over the first 10 years to $1.4 trillion, still $600 billion higher than the Republicans’ position. And another said the president also proposed that the two sides commit to working on overhauling the corporate tax code next year.

Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Boehner made a rare statement from the floor of the House admonishing the president to offer more, and more specific, spending cuts.

“Taxes are going to go up one way or another,” he said, “and I think the key is that taxes go up on high-end individuals.”

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Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is among the Republicans growing wary of a deal between the president and the speaker.Credit
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

The direct discussions followed a week in which preliminary negotiations among top-level staff advisers had not gone well, according to people in both parties, with time running out before a year-end deadline for action.

The president has no choice but to rely on Mr. Boehner, who leads Republicans’ only center of power. “It’s not like there’s another path; he’s the speaker of the House,” said a senior administration official, who would not comment further about the relations between Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner, which were strained by last year’s failure.

But Democrats in the White House and Congress also say that they believe Mr. Boehner does hold greater sway among Republican colleagues than he did in the summer of 2011, his first year as speaker, given the chastening experience for junior Republicans of both last year’s budget fights and the 2012 election results.

Contributing to that sense of Mr. Boehner’s greater empowerment was the letter he sent to Mr. Obama last week, in which he acknowledged Republicans’ willingness to raise new revenues as part of a deal: It was also signed by the House Republican leadership team, including Mr. Boehner’s occasional intraparty rival, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman and former vice-presidential nominee who has a following among antitax conservatives.

Both men and their advisers continued on Tuesday to be silent on the leaders’ private discussions, which many in both parties took as a sign of potential progress. But the speaker sought to turn up the public pressure on Mr. Obama — and dispel the sense of progress, Republican aides said — with his blast before the C-Span cameras.

“Where are the spending cuts?” Mr. Boehner asked. “The longer the White House slow walks this process, the closer our economy gets to the fiscal cliff.”

His statement seemed directed as much at Republican lawmakers and party activists — to reassure them that he was fighting the good fight against government spending, given Republicans’ likely concessions on taxes — as at the president and the broader public.

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Conservatives have been growing nervous about any deal with Mr. Obama. “I have great respect for the speaker,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Budget Committee, “but he doesn’t have my proxy.”

And Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Tea Party favorite, disparaged any deal that could be struck by “two elected officials and their unelected staff.”

“This is not the end of the world if we go over the fiscal cliff,” he said.

The ambitious goal of the talks is twofold: a framework for long-term deficit reduction through both tax increases on affluent Americans and cuts in spending for Medicare and other entitlement-benefit programs, with many details to be hashed out next year, and an immediate measure to block more than $500 billion in economically threatening spending cuts and tax increases that would take effect in January absent the alternative deficit-reduction compromise.

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Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, emerged from a luncheon caucus with other Senate Democrats to say a resolution would be “extremely difficult” before Christmas. Failure would force lawmakers to return to the Capitol in the week before the New Year’s deadline for 11th-hour legislative drama — risking a voter backlash much like last year. He also pointed to what he called “infighting going on with the House leadership” about the direction of the talks, but Republicans dismissed that notion.

That 2011 showdown between Mr. Obama and Congressional Republicans over increasing the nation’s debt limit hurt both the recovery and the public-approval ratings of both sides, but especially Republicans, who lost seats in the House and Senate. The $1 trillion spending-cuts deal that ended that fight followed the collapse of the Obama-Boehner talks for a $3 trillion deal to stabilize the growth of federal debt.

This week the president and speaker took direct control after staff-level talks bogged down late last week, largely over what one person close to the White House called “the big 2”: Republicans’ demands that Mr. Obama agree both to a slow increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, to 67 from 65, and to a new formula that would reduce cost-of living increases for Social Security.

Mr. Obama has balked; he opposes both ideas and faces heavy pressure from unions and other progressive groups to reject them. But his stance is undercut by the fact that he had tentatively agreed to both proposals in last year’s secret talks, in return for Mr. Boehner’s support for raising taxes on high-income earners.

The president and his aides have told Mr. Boehner and his team that both proposals would be a hard sell to other Democrats, people close to the talks say.

A version of this article appears in print on December 12, 2012, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: As Fiscal Talks Heat Up, Questions on Whether Boehner Can Get the Votes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe